The Milky Way in autumn. The ancients saw the Via Lactea as the nourishing milk of a Feminine Cosmos.

Tonight, ancient feminine energies — Venus and Persephone — meet in the last, critical degree of Scorpio.  This is the sign of the Cosmic Transformer, the realm of the depths, where the mysteries of regeneration take place and the cycle of death and rebirth plays out in all its myriad forms.  Tonight, the feminine powers of Love and transformation merge their energies in the Cosmos around you and in the Cosmos within you — wherever that final, potent degree of Scorpio falls in your inner sky.

Autumn is both Persephone’s season and one of two — along with the budding and blossoming of spring — that Venus rules,  After the Autumn Equinox, we enter the territory of the deepest and most awe-drenched mysteries of our existence. In just a few weeks, the Sun will enter Scorpio.  Then comes Samhain, the final “cross-quarter” day — a cosmic tipping point, when the Sun stands halfway between Autumn Equinox and the WInter Solstice. Celebrated across the globe as the Day of the Dead and All Soul’s Night, this cross-quarter moment of the year is a time when the veils between the worlds are at their thinnest.

The Nine Nights of the Goddess: Celebrating the Transformative Feminine

In India, the evening following the First New Moon after the Equinox launches Navaratri, the Nine Nights of the Goddess. With ritual worship in the mornings and feasting and dancing in the evenings, this festival celebrates three expressions of the Cosmic Feminine for three nights each.  Each reveals a different side of the hidden wisdom that belongs to Scorpio:

• Durga and her fearsome aspect, the powerful agent of radical and revolutionary change, Kali, who destroy evil and illusion, is honored for the first three nights.
• Lakshmi, who brings wealth, prosperity, and good fortune, is the fous of the second three nights, when Venus and Persephone will be in Sagittarius, sign of the Cosmic Blessing Giver.
• Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom and creativity, is venerated in the concluding nights of Navaratri.

Demeter, the Great Earth Goddess who was Persephone’s mother, at the Prado.

The Feminine Nature of the Underworld

In the West, the connections between autumn and its feminine mysteries of transformation are far more powerful — and ancient — than Pluto’s rule of Scorpio.  As Hellenistic astrologer Demetra George tells us in Finding Our Way Through the Dark: The Astrology of the Dark Goddesses, Pluto was the first ruler of the Underworld who was not a goddess.

Perhaps this tells us something fundamental about Pluto’s desire for Persephone, in the Deep Time story chronicling his abduction of the beautiful young daughter of the Great Mother.  Perhaps there is something about the Underworld and its life-restoring, wealth-creating power that can only be unlocked by the Feminine.  “Many of the qualities of the dark feminine that some astrologers have correlated with Pluto,” writes George, “are actually aspects of Persephone and other dark goddesses who preceded her.”  She continues:

In the archaic form of Demeter as a triple goddess, her full moon mother aspect was known by the name of Ploutos. [He even stole her name!] In the pre-Hellenic version of her myth, Persephone voluntarily went into the Underworld for part of each year to tend to the dead.  

The story of her rape and abduction was a later adjunct to the myth first recorded by Homer in the 8th century BC which spoke to the patriarchal takeover by the God Pluto of the Great Mother’s rulership over death and rebirth.

(italics and boldface mine).

We stand again at an evolutionary gateway even more profound than the one that opened 5,000 years ago  Then, as now, our consciousness was changing — around us, and within us too.  Now, as then, our relationship to the Cosmic Feminine was at the center.  The skies show us that we’re in a  time of unprecedented upheaval in the relationship between the fundamental energies of life.   We’re living in a time saturated with new possibility. Everything’s up for renegotiation now — within us and around us.  

Persephone: Primal, Powerful, and Ever Transforming.”

Persephone crated an “unalterable shift” in the Cosmos, Arielle Gutman observes in Mythic Astrology.  Becoming the Underworld Queen who moved back and forth between the Upper and Under worlds, Persephone connected the world of souls and the world of matter in a way that had never before happened. “Never forget,” cautions the astrology blogger Esoteric Embers in one of her many brilliant essays, that Persephone was feared and powerful” — the queen both of soul and spirit.

The Universe: Great Feminine Being

Now, 5,000 years later, Persephone and Venus meet for the first time in the Uranus-Pluto Era.  Perhaps these ancient energies are enabling us to take our next, fateful leap.  Perhaps we are learning to move back and forth between Underworld, upper World, and the vast reaches of the Cosmos itself. Perhaps we are discovering the Universe as the ancients across the world once knew it — a great feminine being.  Much of what we are learning about its nature — the mysteries of black holes, wormholes, quasars, pulsars — is deeply resonant with the ancient feminine mysteries of Persephone, Inanna, Kali, and Durga.

Uranus, Pluto, and the Cosmic Feminine

Both Uranus and Pluto, the mighty world-changers, have power that is inextricably tied to the feminine.  Venus, remember, was the daughter of Uranus the primordial Sky God, whose passion for Gaia created our world.  When Uranus was overthrown, the son who castrated him — Saturn — tossed his father’s genitals into the ocean.  From that fertile foam, born from  primal Chaos, stepped Aphrodite.  Tonight, she merges with Persephone, who ruled the Underworld with Pluto. The Nine Nights of the Goddess remind us this is a time for dancing and for praying — the holy nights of an evolving Cosmos, around us and within us.